Adapting an Agent-Based Negotiation Protocol for a Collaborative Network of CBM Service Providers

The only way to minimize maintenance cost and contemporarily maximize plant availability is to perform a condition based maintenance (CBM) strategy for the main critical equipments of the system. This kind of maintenance requires a condition monitoring system and expert skills in order to forecast the degradation phenomenon. Very often these type of competences and the relative maintenance activities are managed by external service providers. So the actual configuration of the maintenance services of a factory is composed by a network of medium and small enterprise that work coordinating by a main contractor without any real integration or cooperation able to improve service efficiency. In this paper we suggest an approach to achieve a condition based maintenance in legacy plants, without peculiar exceptions for the technology involved, maintained through a collaborative network of enterprises. A demonstration unit was built as a test case for the functioning of the expert system to manage the condition based maintenance and the network of skills involved. In the present work, we present a widening regarding the negotiation mechanism that is one the most important issue of the expert system for the collaborative network management.